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On March 10, 1844, Mormon founder Joseph Smith preached a sermon after the burial of his friend King Follett, killed by accidental rock-fall while building a well. To an assembled crowd of his followers, Smith proclaimed, “If you have power to seal on earth & in heaven then we should be crafty. . . . Go & seal on earth your sons & daughters unto yourself & yourself unto your fathers in eternal glory . . . use a little Craftiness & seal all you can & when you get to heaven tell your father that what you seal on earth should be sealed in heaven. I will walk through the gate of heaven and Claim what I seal & those that follow me & my Council.” 

These instructions, an idiosyncratic combination of folk wit, biblical allusion, perfectionism, and a complex challenge to the waning theocentric heaven of Calvinism, thrilled early Latter-day Saints. Early Mormonism’s most prolific diarist, Apostle Wilford Woodruff, proclaimed this sermon “one of the most important & interesting subjects ever presented to the saints.”Woodruff was impressed with good reason: This sermon dramatically illustrated several aspects of Joseph Smith’s theology and eschatology. Standing figuratively over the corpse of a loyal follower, Smith instructed his followers to require of God through their “Craftiness” that He honor the eternal persistence of their relationships.This funeral sermon, devoted generally to the relationship between the immortal prophet Elijah and the Messiah, pointed toward something grander than the immortalized hearth that would prevail in portions of mid-nineteenth-century Protestant ism as the domestic heaven. Before and during Smith’s lifetime, the traditional view that human relationships amounted to nothing beside the majesty of God in the afterlife, often called “theocentric,” was transitioning to a “domestic” or “anthropocentric” model in which human relationships remained in full force in heaven.Over his religious career, Smith proposed a solution that relied on neither theocentric nor domestic views of afterlife. 

To capture such an afterlife Smith employed a version of the ancient Great Chain of Being, a philosophical/theological construct that arranged all of creation, from stones to humans to angels to God, in exact hierarchical relations. This chain had ordered cosmic and human societies since early Christianity, with particular prominence in medieval thought, as exemplified in Robert Fludd’s 1618 depiction. 

Notoriously supporting the divine right of kings, the chain’s importance had receded significantly in the wake of the American Revolution. Despite a loss in political and scientific currency, elements of the chain remained vividly alive in Joseph Smith’s world. Throughout his career, if most publicly and dramatically in the 1840s, Smith employed the Great Chain of Being (also known as the Scale of Being/Creation, Scala Naturae, or Golden Chain) in a novel familial reflex to define the afterlife fate of believers. In his transformation of the largely obsolete philosophical construct of the chain, Smith creatively mediated the tensions between the theocentric and domestic heavens, simultaneously negotiating the contradictory currents of the extended patriarchal family and the nuclear, “democratic” family structure of the transforming American Republic.His was a sacerdotal answer to the domestic heaven, not just one early version of it. 

In an ambitious reworking of the concept, Joseph Smith linked all of creation in a new familial relationship that uprooted angels from the upper echelons of the chain and placed sanctified humans in their stead. Temple and priesthood ordinances— anointings, sealings, endowment, adoption, and polygamy—became the mechanisms by which Joseph Smith shattered death as a barrier, asserted salvation as a sacramental and relational state, and created a hierarchical kinship network whose ties were invulnerable to death. He thus cut through the competing religious views of his time: the apparent caprice of Calvinist election and the uncertainty of backsliding from Arminian regeneration.This Chain of Being, transmuted into a Chain of Belonging, made many early Mormon beliefs sensible: divine anthropology (the conspecificity of angels, gods, and humans), the familialization of salvation (through temple sealings), and the continuity of human beings and cosmos (often called metaphysical “correspondence”). 

Smith’s embrace of a revised chain demonstrates just how similar his worldview appeared to the antique worldview while simultaneously exhibiting a specific example of the more general process by which formal philosophical constructs evolve in the hands of non-specialist religious practitioners who are driven to meet specific communal and personal needs. 

This essay begins with a sketch of the origins and history of the Great Chain of Being. I then lay out the progression of Joseph Smith’s thought from the early 1830s until his death in 1844—a progression characterized by remarkable continuities of both social problems and theological solutions. Key documents in this development included (1) two remarkable 1832 revelations, “The Vision” and “The Olive Leaf,” (2) Joseph Smith’s 1835 encounter with Egyptian manuscripts and their impact on his understanding of Kirtland Temple theology, (3) Nauvoo developments, including an expanded view of temple rites, and (4) Joseph’s increasingly refined understanding of divine anthopology—the ontological equivalence of gods and humans. The abrupt end of Joseph Smith’s life in 1844 cut short his refinement of these concepts, but the Twelve—especially Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff, Parley P. Pratt, and Orson Hyde—explicitly and enthusiastically preached Joseph Smith’s Chain of Belonging, uniting doctrine with temple rituals in the Mormon conquest of death. 

While Smith’s reconceptualization of the chain is a reminder of its flexibility—many ideas could be understood as instantiations of such a broad philosophical concept—the application of the chain among Mormons is often quite explicit and accounts for theological continuities that are otherwise difficult to explain. Smith was no neoplatonist, but his theologies represent an inspiring dialogue with remnants of neoplatonic beliefs in his milieu. 

The Great Chain of Being 

Arthur Lovejoy’s 1933 William James lectures remain the standard intellectual history of the Chain of Being, tracing it from Plato and Aristotle to its resurgence in Christian neoplatonism (and Augustine’s influential reformulation of the neoplatonic concept) to its final absorption into the taxonomic trees of rising evolutionary models in the late eighteenth century.Based on the principles of plenitude (all things that could exist do exist) and gradation/continuity (all types of things are hierarchically ordered with no gaps between them), the chain encompassed a taxonomy that extended from God through angels and humans to the tiniest particles of dust. Within this biological framework, the chain valorized human beings as rulers of the earth and its life forms, while simultaneously relating them to the suprabiological world. 

The chain had religious and political as well as biological applications. Leibniz used the chain as a theodicy, arguing that evil was a necessary part of the entirety of creation. He explained that evil must be included in this “best of all possible worlds,” an argument that Voltaire parodied mercilessly in his Candide. Samuel Hopkins, Jonathan Edwards’s immediate theological successor in Puritan thought, likewise endorsed a chain-based theodicy in the late eighteenth century.Jonathan Edwards himself used the Chain of Being to ground his famous typologies by which American lives and experiences were anticipated throughout the biblical record.For many, both formally and informally, the chain represented the intimacy of macrocosm and microcosm, the close and influential parallels between the universe and the human body. 

More prosaically, the notion of creation’s immanent hierarchy infiltrated Western societies, whether as the Catholic priesthood, European royalty, social elites, or, in America, white hegemony over enslaved Africans or native peoples.For Puritans, the chain further functioned to represent the infrastructure of their patriarchal family. 

Toward the end of its dominance, the chain, once static by definition, became dynamic—a form of the chain that Lovejoy characterized as “temporal.” By this he meant that hierarchical relationships persisted but that the entire chain could progressen bloc, a development that made boundless the potential for all participants. With beginnings in Immanuel Kant and biologists who endorsed the metaphor of seeds (with their maturation and change over time) to describe species, this temporal chain supported progress within scientific taxonomy.In Lovejoy’s phrase, “Man, at least, was not intended to occupy forever the same place. . . . The scale is literally a ladder to be ascended, not only by the imagination but in fact.”This ladder, invoking Jacob’s ladder (Gen. 28:11–19), traversed the expanse between heaven and earth. 

The “temporal chain” spelled the end of the classical chain but still proved insufficiently flexible to accommodate further developments in Enlightenment thought. Scientifically, the evolutionary tree of life rapidly replaced the temporal chain. Socially the chain fared no better. Even in its dynamic guise, the chain could not resist the rise of America’s “new order for the ages.” In de Tocqueville’s nostalgic and manifestly un-American phrase, “Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king: democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it.” 

The chain had done significant philosophical work for centuries if not millennia. Minimally, it had situated humans within the cosmos, accounted for the existence of evil, explained the nature of angels, described biological diversity, and provided a framework for finding God in nature (“natural theology”). When the chain lost its scientific utility and its sociopolitical relevance, several other elements persisted. Despite a loss in currency, invocations of the chain clearly remained vital in the Early Republic in a mode easily accessible to Mormons and their peers. Several important proponents of the chain spanned the Revolutionary War by decades, including Yale president Ezra Stiles (1727–95) and Benjamin Franklin (1706–90).Thinkers of the following generation carried the torch. From Alexander Campbell (erstwhile friend and principal foe of Smith’s second-in-command Sidney Rigdon) to the famed anti-Mason William Morgan (whose widow, Lucinda, Joseph Smith later polygamously married) to Noah Webster (whose dictionary Smith used in various translation efforts), a variety of early antebellum sources invoked the chain in recognizable form.Where Campbell invoked the “scale of creation” and Webster described the gradations of angels and hierarchies, Morgan invoked a chain of “all created beings, from the highest seraph in heaven to the lowest reptile of the dust.”Esoteric thinkers in the early nineteenth century continued to turn to the Chain of Being to describe how the universe populated itself and progressed.Early eighteenth century sources proclaiming the chain, like Joseph Addison’s Spectator, available at Smith’s local library, or Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, for sale near his hometown, continued to circulate widely in the nineteenth century.Mormons, among many others, enjoyed quoting from the two English writers, including Pope’s famous description of the chain. 

Many mainstream sources equivocated about the chain. The standard antebellum evangelical reference work (the one Smith used and preferred), Charles Buck’s Theological Dictionary, typified nineteenth-century Anglo-American views.Buck proposed equivocally that angels “perhaps have distinct orders.” An invocation of the chain to support natural theology was even more watered down in Buck’s nod toward “the almost infinite diversification of animals and vegetables, and their pertinents, that, not withstanding an amazing similarity, not any two are exactly alike, but every form, member, or even feather or hair of animals, and every pile of grass, stalk of corn, herb, leaf, tree, berry, or other fruit, hath something peculiar to itself.” Other entries relevant to older models of the chain were marked by the refusal of Buck and later editors of the Dictionary to endorse the chain in other than qualified terms. If anything, Buck associated the mystical chain with Gnostic heretics like the Basilidians, who preached hierarchies of angels and planetary creations. 

The exceptions to the general nineteenth-century diminution of the chain were primarily natural theology and perfectionism. For some natural theologians, the chain represented an ideal method to integrate scientific taxonomies into their view of nature as a second scripture beside the Bible, something like Buck’s “diversification of animals and vegetables.”Outside theology, the chain became a metaphor for the grandeur of the natural world in the hands of entertainers like P. T. Barnum and various travel writers. 

Natural theology (including religious astronomy) and nature writing were not, however, the final refuge of the chain. In a society redefining itself as the ascendancy of the common man, an optimistic belief about human potential also appropriated the language of the chain, though only in its later, temporal form. Famously the conceptual plaything of metaphysical thinkers like An drew Jackson Davis (1826–1910) or George Dexter (co-author of the noted spiritualist Judge Edmonds),the temporal chain also had a home closer to the mainstream, including even the conservative and cautious Charles Buck, who maintained that “by this [the Knowledge of God] we are allied to angels, and are capable of rising forever in the scale of being.”This dynamic chain, with its accommodation to human potential, supported endless advancement in opposition to the elitism of a static chain. Forward-looking Protestants who rejected the canonical chain as too closely associated with Catholic and royal hierarchies or European aristocracy found the temporal chain appealing. Mormon leaders promised proselytes in 1840 that, if they gathered to Mor monism’s holy Zion, they would “rise higher and higher in the scale of intel[li]gence until they ‘can comprehend with all Saints the length and breadth and de[p]th and height, and know the love of God which passeth knowledge.’”Progress in this application of the chain paralleled the progress promised by education and knowledge. 

References to the chain were not just rhetorical flourishes. In the early national period, the image and its underlying philosophy still provided for some the infrastructure for religious belief, particularly when it came to astronomy. The Scottish amateur theologian and astronomer Thomas Dick (1774–1857) made the chain central to his characterization of the cosmos in his popular 1826 Philosophy of Religion. In Dick’s encapsulation, “We have the strongest reason to believe, that the distant regions of the material world are also replenished with intellectual beings, of various orders, in which there may be a gradation upwards, in the scale of intellect above that of a man, as diversified as that which we perceive in the descending scale, from man downwards to the immaterial principles which animates a muscle [mussel], a snail, or a microscopic animalcula.”Dick called these beings “subordinate intelligences” and reveled in “the progressions they have made from one state of improvement to another.”He advanced similar claims in his 1829 Philosophy of a Future State, which described a plurality of worlds filled with “intelligences,” suprahuman constituents of an astronomical Chain of Being. Dick allowed for angels to represent at least some of these “subordinate intelligences.”Latter-day Saints proudly reprinted excerpts from Dick’s work in their Kirtland newspaper in 1837. 

Joseph Smith’s Chain 

The Vision 

The Mormon Chain of Belonging, my name for Smith’s genealogical revision of the Chain of Being, is a complex conceptual structure with impressive continuities over Smith’s career. His dialogue with these ideas began as early as 1832. While with time they became more distinctly enunciated, more public, and more liturgically sophisticated, the Mormon chain appeared early in Smith’s career. He began describing cosmic hierarchies in 1832 in several important revelations for the fledgling church, including the February “Vision” and the December “Olive Leaf.”In the early phase, Smith emphasized particularly the afterlife, cosmic hierarchies, and priesthood. 

The Vision, a waking eschatological vision that Smith received in company with Sidney Rigdon, came as the two pondered “St. John’s gospel” (John 5:29) for the New Translation of the Bible. Smith and Rigdon posited that, “if God rewarded every one according to the deeds done in the body, the term ‘heaven,’ as intended for the saint’s eternal home, must include more kingdoms than one.”The Vision was not simply the familiar Protestant debate about degrees of glory, though.The biblical infrastructure for Smith’s graduated heaven was the scripture most commonly associated with the chain through its history, Paul’s famous treatise on resurrection (1 Corinthians 15). 

In the letter to the Corinthians, Paul employed a sustained astral simile. As the dim stars deferred to the moon, and the moon in turn to the bright sun, so did humans enter a glorious hierarchy after death. In his letter, Paul mentioned only heavenly and earthly beings (“celestial” and “terrestrial” in the Authorized Version), while Smith, filling a perceived lacuna in the text, disclosed a third kingdom of glory that he called “telestial,” apparently a composite of the first two meant to correspond to stars. Smith’s scribes used language from Thomas Dick’s invocation of the chain to introduce the revelation, calling it “the economy of God and his vast creation throughout all eternity.” This “economy,” a clumsy calque from the Greek scriptures, often referred to the chain.Smith was revealing human fate within an astral hierarchy, affirmed by the New Testament. When Smith returned to the Vision in 1842 in a ghostwritten poetic restatement designed to prove his prophetic credentials, he emphasized that the kingdoms “all harmonize like the parts of a tune,” an allusion to the harmonies central to the chain.Though the Vision is remembered as describing three kingdoms, in fact it described an infinite hierarchy of glories modeled on celestial bodies. 

A distinctive revelation from spring 1832 helps to date the development of the Chain of Belonging and its associated divine anthropology. As part of his ongoing efforts to recover the lost language of Eden, Smith shared with his inner circle a “Sample of Pure Language.” In it Smith explained that Awman (spelled Ahman in publications) represented divinity, the divine species, “the being which made all things in all its parts.” This strange phrase emphasized the images of parts coming together to constitute a harmonic whole—a kind of dynamic integration at the center of the chain. Je sus, humans, and angels all received names in this revelation—Son Ahman, Sons Ahman, and Angls-man, respectively. The revelation also emphasized hierarchy. Even in this early statement stood the hint that humans would be superior to angels, for humans were “the greatest parts of Awman,” while angels were to “minister for or to” humans.At the same time Ahman was beginning to figure prominently in revelations about the Garden of Eden, pan-human genealogy, and eschatology.These ancient names for humans, gods, and angels emphasized their conspecificity and their integration as “parts” of a harmonious whole. Ahman, the Sons Ahman, and the association between Adam and a lineal priesthood persisted throughout Smith’s career. 

In September 1832 during a prayerful meeting with itinerant elders, Smith announced a revelation “on priesthood.” After declaring the necessity of building a temple, he traced the priesthood of Moses backward to Abraham and then on to Adam. The ancient, sacred power of priesthood thus became distinctly lineal in Mormon thought (D&C 84:6–18). He also clarified that the priesthood was to be hierarchically arranged into “higher” and “lesser” orders. Hinting at metaphysical unities, the revelation on priesthood then began to describe an entity called the Light of Christ, which enlightened every human soul (D&C 84:45–46). Toward the end of the revelation, a “Song of Zion” personified the Earth as obeying God (D&C 84:100). (In May 1833 Smith expanded the image of light as metaphysical power in a striking revelation: D&C 93: esp. 2, 9, 28–29, 36). In the early 1830s, priesthood was a hierarchy of people and also the power, analogous to light, by which it all worked. 

The Olive Leaf 

In December 1832, Smith revealed the “Olive Leaf” as a charter for the School of the Prophets, the seminary-cum-fraternity from which the temple liturgy grew (D&C 88). The revelation ranged across a large conceptual space. After emphasizing that particular laws govern particular glories, Smith proposed afterlife glories as a cosmic map that met the requirements of the traditional chain: “There are many kingdoms; for there is no space in the which there is no kingdom; and there is no kingdom in which there is no space, either a greater or a lesser kingdom” (D&C 88:37). This was an almost canonical statement of gradation/continuity from the Great Chain of Being with its emphasis on filling every possible space with an object or entity perfectly fitted to that space. Moving in and out of several loosely related proof texts, Smith praised the perfect order of heavenly bodies, the type of religious astronomy that carried the chain into the nineteenth century. Smith reported that Jesus was not only “the light of truth” which was “the light of Christ” but was also “in” the universe’s celestial bodies: sun, moon, and stars. He was also “the law by which all things are governed, even the power of God” (D&C 88:7–13). Smith then reappropriated Christ’s parable of the twelve laborers in the vineyard to confirm the Vision. Contrary to received interpretations of the parable, in which day laborers received the same wage no matter when they started their work, Smith revealed that the twelve laborers received different “glories,” according to the time they began to labor in the vineyard. Corroborating received interpretations, Smith acknowledged that each laborer would enter into the heavenly hierarchy and be saved; but countering Protestant interpretations, Smith saw the duration of their labor as the marker of the glory they would inherit in heaven (D&C 88:51–61; cf. Matt. 20:1–16).(In the 1840s, Lorenzo Snow reportedly clarified that the different glories of the laborers in the Olive Leaf were best understood within the context of the dynamic chain, further proof that believers would progress through time to a state of perfection.) 

Among its theological ideas, the Olive Leaf also directed the construction of the Kirtland Temple and taught Mormons how to bind themselves in a covenant or “determination” intended to last “forever and ever,” supported by ritual practices and the power Smith called priesthood (D&C 88:133). Before he completed the Kirtland Temple, Joseph Smith returned to images of celestial hierarchies, a mystical power called priesthood uniting them, and the compelling figure of Adam in Eden. 

The Egyptian Project 

In June 1835, Smith began a sustained encounter with Egyptian funerary papyri purchased from an itinerant showman named Michael Chandler who was touring Ohio. Smith’s time with the papyri yielded two principal manuscript collections, the unpublished Kirtland Egyptian Papers (KEP), which merged the Mormon quest for pure language with the problem of interpreting the hieroglyphs, and the canonized Book of Abraham. The Book of Abraham is reasonably well known; the unpublished KEP largely include interpretive dictionaries that contain names for hieroglyphs associated with various definitions that carry through multiple levels of grammatical ramification called “degrees.”(Controversies over the nature of the relationships between the papyri, the KEP, and the Book of Abraham need not detain us here.) The Egyptian project highlighted a celestial hierarchy patterned on the Chain of Being, an idea circulating in Kirtland that spring. 

During their encounter with the papyri, Smith and his colleagues emphasized the parallel between people and planets, linked priesthood with genealogy, described correspondences between light and time, and highlighted the significance of Eden and Adam. Smith emphasized early and often the association between the funerary papyri and “the system of astronomy” that “was unfolded” through them, with a special emphasis on “the formation of the planetary System.”Though it is tempting to situate the astrophysical speculations of the Egyptian project within established astronomies—Ptolemaic, Copernican, or otherwise— early Mormon ideas about stars overflowed the boundaries of formal astronomy. 

It was natural in nineteenth-century America to associate Egypt with sacred astronomy, and astronomy within sacred history.The Bible joined traditional scholarship and folk wisdom with narratives about magicians and divines who saw truth in the skies, about prophets who could make the sun rotate backwards, and about a God who marked the birth of his Messiah-son by positioning a star over the baby’s crib. The Leonid meteor shower of November 1833 impressed many, including the Latter-day Saints, and celestial wonders played a central role in the wonder lore that defined for many the imminence of the return of Christ. 

Within the KEP, Smith and William Phelps—Smith’s most active collaborator on the Egyptian project—wove together a distinctive exegesis of the Hebrew astrogony (Gen. 1:14–18), a literal reading of 2 Peter 3:8 (“one day is with the Lord as a thousand years”) and the commonplace view, confirmed by their favorite theological dictionary, that time is a “mode of duration marked by certain periods, chiefly by the motion and revolution of the sun.” Following these leads, they suggested that celestial bodies determined their gravitas on the basis of the time signaled by the length of their orbit.To solidify the biblical foundation for this mathematical proposition, they employed cubits as an astronomical metric. These special cubits (one quarter of “the leng[th] from the end of the longest finger to the end of the other when the arms are extended,” approximately twenty-one inches) measured the length of an orbit, thus the amount of time required to revolve around a center place. 

At the apex of the astronomical hierarchy, orbits and times merged. There “the measurement according to Celestial time . . . signifies one day to a cubit, which day is equal to a thousand years according to the measurement of this earth.”(Phelps and Smith were employing a symbolic multiplier of length parallel to the multiplier of time, whereby a day is a thousand years; neither was so obtuse as to believe that a star’s orbit was actually less than two feet.) Smith had emphasized the tight correlation between planets and time in the 1832 Olive Leaf. The key passage describes the “law . . . by which they [“the heavens and the earth . . . and all the planets”] move in their times and their seasons.” The next verse repeats in even more insistent detail: “And they give light to each other in their times and in their seasons, in their minutes, in their hours, in their days, in their weeks, in their months, in their years—all these are one year with God, but not with man” (D&C 88:42–44). A few months before the papyri arrived, Oliver Cowdery had conscientiously referred to “a few days, measured by this present sun.”The association of human lives with the orbits of celestial bodies was already part of Mormon thought, an association strengthened in the Egyptian project. 

The choice of cubits to describe orbital distances seems idiosyncratic at first glance, though others attributed Egyptian measurements to the body. In the phrase of one popular lecturer, such Egyptian measurements were “coeval with [the] hand of our first father Adam!” In Mormon hands, cubits emphasized the close association between human and cosmos in Mormon sacred astronomy. Just as orbits measured human lives, so did human bodies measure orbits.These images are not precisely the zodiacal body of folk religion, though they draw on the same conceptual context.The published Book of Abraham confirms this reading in its description of a gradation of “set times” for stars leading “unto the throne of God” (Abr. 3:10, 4:15–16). 

Smith proposed a parallel hierarchy of celestial bodies based on light, recalling his 1832 revelation “on priesthood” and the 1833 Doctrine and Covenants 93. A distinctive exegesis of Gene sis 1:14–18 appears to be the biblical basis for this hierarchy of light among celestial bodies. Light was the essence uniting them all—a metaphor (or alternate name for) priesthood. It was the medium by which stars reached human awareness, the power that separated stars from the inky blackness of the night sky. Within the KEP, the glyph Flos isis signifies “the highest degree of life, because its component parts are light . . . the light of the grand governi[n]g of 15 fixed stars centre there.”Astral light largely confirmed the hierarchies that ordered and linked space and time; bodies with more central orbits possessed greater light. In another “degree,” the glyph Flosisis signifies “the King of day or the central moving planet, from which the other governing moving planets receive their light—having a less motion—slow in its motion.”A derivative glyph, Kli flosis, “signifies Kolob in its motion, which is swifter than the rest of the twelve fixed stars; going before, being first in motion.”These related glyphs merge the hierarchies of light and time within KEP. 

This Kolob, both brightest and with the most central orbit, is the most familiar of the celestial bodies described in the Egyptian project. Within the KEP, Kolob represents “the first creation . . . nearer to the Celestial, or the residence of God.”This star was the “first in government, the last pertaining to the measurement of time.”Smith confirmed the KEP readings in his 1842 Facsimile 2 and in the Book of Abraham, which emphasized the role of Kolob. 

The name Kolob sounds like a minor deformation of the He brew kokab (star), though various other derivations have been proposed. Regardless of derivation, Smith was clear that the name referred to something as “near to” or “nigh unto” God’s throne. The term rapidly made its way into Mormon ritual, discourse, hymnody, and cosmology. As early as 1837, Smith’s followers promised each other that they could translate themselves to this great star at the center of the cosmos, in open defiance of death.Through this especially bright star with a divinely central orbit, Smith showed his followers the way to heaven. 

Though Phelps and Smith were not alone in embracing a physical location for heaven, their attempt to map the biblical heaven directly onto an astronomical system is impressively detailed. Within the KEP, Kolob grounded a scale of creation for celestial bodies. It was the pinnacle of the celestial bodies known as kokaubeam.In this respect, the Mormon central star was the astral equivalent of Adam in the parallel and related human hierarchy described in Mormon scripture. It was the “eldest of all the Stars, the greatest body of the heavenly bodies.”Kolob signified the “first beginning to the bodies of this creation . . . having been appointed for the last time the last or the eldest.”As the eldest hierarch, Kolob received something like priesthood scope over other celestial bodies—“the highest degree of power in government, pertaining to heavenly bodies.”The same motif continued in the published Book of Abraham—amid a chain of orbitally hierarchical stars, Kolob was preeminent. It “govern[ed] all those which belong to the same order as” the earth (Abr. 3:3, 6, 8–9). Using language familiar from priesthood hierarchy and the Chain of Being to describe astral hierarchies, the Egyptian project assumed a kind of equivalence of humans and celestial bodies. 

At times, the KEP suggests that the celestial bodies were themselves planetary patriarchs in a Chain of Being. The KEP authors may have drawn inspiration from a famous dream by Smith’s biblical namesake. In an editorial three years earlier, Phelps had specifically invoked the dream in which “the sun and moon, and the eleven stars made obeisance to” Joseph of Egypt (Gen. 37:1–9) as evidence of Joseph Smith’s authority and holy lineage.The power of the biblical Joseph over his brothers, the tribes of Israel, served as a potent image for Smith and Phelps, providing a biblical language for their astral hierarchies. In an important sense, the astral chain of the KEP recapitulates this patriarchal dream with an American rather than a Hebrew-Egyptian Joseph. 

Phelps and Smith also included the hierarchical kingdoms of the Vision within the KEP hierarchies. One particularly rich glyph combines other simpler glyphs as Lish (a reference to God), Zi (woman or queen), ho e oop (prince), and Iota (seeing/eye). This composite glyph is glossed as “the glory of the celestial Kingdom: The connection of attributes; many parts perfected, and compounded into one Having been united . . . one glory above all other glories, as the [sun] excels the moon in light, this glory ex cels being filled with the same glory equally.” This glyph reiterated the astral hierarchy described in the Vision in a way that emphasized the familial unity of the highest echelon of that celestial chain. When the Egyptian pictogram placed a man and a woman together in the presence of God, Smith subsumed the entire Chain of Being into the human family, whose “many parts” were thereby “united.”Several other glyphs describe the “degrees and parts” of the many afterlife kingdoms described in the Vision.Human afterlife hierarchies paralleled astral hierarchies within the Egyptian project. 

Extending Smith’s images in the Egyptian project as well as later exegesis in the 1840s, several of Smith’s lieutenants took the notion of correspondent hierarchies so far as to impute something like consciousness to celestial bodies after their prophet’s death. Whether Smith would go as far as his heirs, he certainly intended planets to be jointly encompassed by natural hierarchies.Historian Michael Walzer’s description of early modern English thought might as easily apply to Smith and his associates: “Within the great chain there were discovered a whole series of lesser chains—the animal hierarchy, presided over by eagle and lion; the nine angelic orders; the greater and lesser stars—and these were held to correspond closely to one another.”Such was the language of the Vision and the Olive Leaf taken to its imaginative conclusion. 

By the inexorable if often metaphorical logic of correspondence, and with the authority of ancient tradition, many antebellum Americans also saw their postmortal fate in the stars. Invoking most often the Jobian “morning stars” who “sang together” with the “sons of God” during creation (Job 38:4–7) or the story of Lucifer, the fallen star (Isa. 14:12), a variety of cultural commonplaces confirmed a belief in the identity of the dead, often as angels, with astral bodies. 

In 1832 Phelps had urged greater industry by telling the Latter-day Saints to model their behavior on the ever-faithful stars: “Since the heaven was stretched out as a curtain between this world and the worlds beyond, neither the sun, nor the moon, nor the planets, nor the stars, have ceased for a moment, (except when Joshua commanded otherwise,) from performing their daily labors.”Phelps extended this image in early 1835 by urging Christian belief and practice on his readers, “that we may be quickened in the resurrection, and become angels, even Sons of God, for an eternity of glory, in a universe of worlds, which have ever taught, and will forever Teach mankind, as they shine / God’s done his part,—do thine!”Phelps’s “worlds”—his term for celestial bodies—inspired their human kin to greater obedience to the dictates of God. 

Images of humans as stars were an important element in public memorials for the dead among many Americans. For example, when Elizabeth Griffin died of “inflammation of the bowels” in Nauvoo at the tender age of “10 months 19 days,” the memorialist, probably her parent, included an apostrophe to her astral spirit: “a pure and brilliant star, / Thou dost shine in realms afar.” A eulogy suggested a similar fate for Bishop Edward Partridge, who would “rise from a Saint to an angel of light.”The sense of astral correspondence is also strong in the 1840 eulogy of Smith’s own father, delivered by Joseph Jr.’s secretary, which evoked the dead who “like the stars in yonder firmament, shone in their several spheres, and filled that station in which they had been called by the providence of God.”Even critics recognized the currency of such expressions among the Saints. For example, the learned Congregationalist Jonathan Baldwin Turner (1805–99) reported of the Mormon faithful: “Doubtless they will shine as stars somewhere in [their] new firmament of gods.” 

Early Latter-day Saints did not stand alone in their religious astronomy. Mainstream authors also employed astral metaphors. Presbyterian revivalist Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) referred to Lucifer and his followers as “wandering stars,” an image that invoked biblical traditions (Jude 1:13) and recalled John Milton’s (1608–1674) extensive use of this image in Paradise Lost (1667).Finney’s peer, Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), for his part, presented stars as steadfast witnesses of God worth emulating. The ever-popular Josiah Priest (1788–1851) compared a Mesoamerican tribal belief that the “sun and the stars” were the “souls of the departed” to the biblical book of Daniel (14:12), which taught that the righteous “shall shine as the BRIGHTNESS of the firmament.” In this apparently shared belief of postmortal astralization, Priest saw proof that Native American afterlife traditions derived directly from ancient Israel.Particularly across the boundary of death, a variety of early Americans saw themselves and their fates in the stars. What distinguished Mormons was the intensity of the belief in astral correspondence and the theological and ritual supports for the belief. 

In the metonymy of correspondence, the central star seemed to point toward the center of the earth’s power, Eden, and its priest/patriarch Adam. Employing the sacred word Ahman to describe the site of Adam’s deathbed and of the reunion of the entire human family at the second coming of Christ (Adam-ondi Ahman), Smith and Phelps foregrounded the priestly figure Adam or Phah eh within the Egyptian project.The Egyptian project is obsessed with the overlap between genealogy and progeny on the one hand and priesthood on the other. Many of the glyphs as well as the Book of Abraham emphasize this point. In the published scripture, God told Abraham that he and his seed were by definition “Priesthood” (Abr. 2:11). Degrees, the ramifications of meaning in the logic of the Egyptian grammar documents, draw attention to images of reproduction as extension of power. Emblematically a queen named Katouhmun (one of the mummies whose papyri Smith was interpreting) ascends the marital hierarchy, and a glyph for a powerful patriarch describes the “extension of power by marriage or by ordination.” The center of genealogical and sacerdotal power was Adam. The word Ahman returned as the paradisiacal home of all humanity. 

The Kirtland Temple 

In the midst of the dramatic work on the funeral papyri and in fulfillment of the Olive Leaf revelation, the Saints completed the Kirtland Temple during the winter of 1835–36. In March and April 1836, Smith dedicated this first Mormon temple in enactments extending over several days accompanied by a Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit. Though this holy season proximately emphasized the evangelistic “endowment of power” that would allow Mormon elders to proselytize the world, the Kirtland Temple and its associated rites pointed toward later developments in Smith’s liturgy. 

The building’s internal architecture itself represented Smith’s abandonment of Protestantism. This temple, like the others Smith planned, contained tiered pulpits against the east and west interior walls. The eastern pulpits represented the priesthood hierarchy, rising from the “Presidents of Elders” at the table below, to the “Presidents of High Priests,” to the “Presiding Apostles,” and culminating in the “Melchizedek Council Presiding.”These pul pits ascended the scale of Smith’s priesthood row by row, reifying his 1832 distinction between the two priesthoods and the strong hierarchy within them. 

Probably the central experience of the latter-day Pentecost came on April 3. In a vision that mediated the two impulses of hierarchical order and charismatic excess, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery knelt in prayer among the tiered pulpits, at which time Jehovah appeared, followed by Elijah. This Elijah, the “Prophet, who was taken to Heaven without tasting death,” hovered atop the priesthood hierarchy, appearing as Moroni had predicted he would a decade earlier.Smith and Cowdery, at the angel’s urging, saw this encounter as a harbinger of the Millennium and as fulfilling Malachi’s prophecy that God would “turn the hearts of the children to the fathers” and vice versa.Smith soon separated his Elijah from the more traditional Protestant view of a millennial harbinger by denominating the latter “Elias,” the Greek transliteration of Elijah.In the 1840s, Smith went to great lengths to explain the significance of Elijah and his mystical power, termed “priesthood,” to effect seals between people that would integrate them into the Chain of Belonging. Elijah’s priesthood was to be the power by which all of humanity would enter a hierarchy of power patterned on family relationships. (Though with time integrated into the Melchizedek Priesthood, initially Elijah’s priesthood seemed to exist in concert with the Melchizedek and patriarchal priesthoods.) 

These temple experiences, coupled with the conceptual power of the Egyptian project, inspired the Saints. Enthusiastically, the Messenger and Advocate in 1837 published John Bowring’s (1792– 1872) idiosyncratic translation of Gavrila Derzhavin’s (1743–1816) poem “God” (1784), which proclaimed: 

I am something fashioned by thy hand! 
I hold a middle rank, ‘twixt heaven and earth, 
On the last verge of being stand, 
Close to the realm where Angels have their birth,
Just on the boundary of the spirit land! 
The chain of being is complete in me; 
In me is matter’s last gradations lost, 
And the next step is spirit-Deity!” 

Bowring’s redaction (though not Derzhavin’s original) represented a heavily anthropocentric view of the chain, while maintaining its sense of heaven and earth merged in human beings. The poem confirmed and echoed the doctrines the Latter-day Saints were learning from Smith’s revelations, the temple liturgy, and the translations of the Egyptian project. The modified Chain of Being emphasized human beings and their proximity to God, mediated through celestial hierarchies. In Nauvoo these concepts became dramatically more actual for the Saints through an expansion of the temple liturgy and its associated theologies. 

Nauvoo and the Temple 

In the early 1840s, Smith expanded liturgy and doctrine to clarify and establish his Chain of Belonging primarily within the setting of the temple cultus. The 1830s ideas about and images of cosmic hierarchy flourished and expanded. What changed in Nauvoo were the ritual infrastructure and the degree to which it moved onto the public stage. The fundamental notions about cosmic hierarchies, the conspecificity of humans, gods, and angels, metaphysical correspondence, and a genealogical priesthood power had been present since the 1830s. But in Nauvoo Smith expanded the temple liturgy, published the Book of Abraham as the major product of the Egyptian project, and spelled out the full implications of the divine anthropology in public sermons. The “scale of existence” to which Mormons belonged settled into its ultimate public form. 

In fall 1840, Smith announced in a funeral sermon for Seymour Brunson that the Saints were recovering a lost rite from ancient Christianity: baptism for the dead. Through this ritual, according to the New Testament the ordinance of divine adoption, the Latter-day Saints could reach back through time to establish linkages with the long dead. In doing so, they became “Saviors on Mount Zion,” a term that not only described the rite in terms of its salvific power but also pointed toward the ultimate state of humans as divine beings patterned on Christ.By early 1844, Smith was preaching that “those who are baptised for their dead are the Saviours on mount Zion & they must receave their washings and their anointings for their dead, the same as for themselvs, till they are connected to the ones in the dispensation before us and trace their leniage to connect the priesthood again.”In 1842 he ex plained that this would be a “welding link” between generations (D&C 128:18). 

Baptism for the dead was the first temple rite of Smith’s adoption theology. This theology was rooted in the general Pauline sense that conversion to Christ created a new ethnicity to which believers could be united and in the fairly typical Protestant convention that evangelists “adopted” their converts into the family of God. This traditional sense expanded to incorporate patriarchal blessings and other aspects of the Mormon Chain of Belonging.Although baptism had long been the symbol of becoming a new creature in Christ and entering God’s family (the congregation), Joseph Smith used the rite and its adoptive imagery to broaden the circle of belonging to include the living and the dead in a kinship network that merged genealogical and sacerdotal associations. Temple rites became the entry point for the Chain of Belonging.Priesthood, both as hierarchy and as power, undergirded this process. In 1841, Smith employed the language of the Chain of Being during a description of his priesthood hierarchy as “a principle of order or gradation.”Though the formal rites denominated “adoption” did not arise until after Smith’s death, the concept of adoption infiltrated the rites of anointing and sealing that integrated the Saints into the Chain of Belonging under Smith. 

About a year after announcing baptism for the dead, Smith expanded the temple liturgy further, simultaneously publicizing and expanding the Egyptian project. When he published the Book of Abraham in 1842, he added focused translations of three illustrations known to the Latter-day Saints as “facsimiles,” all of which are reproduced to this day in LDS editions of the Book of Abraham. The hypocephalus presented as facsimile 2—a circle divided into numerous shapes, each containing a symbol and the whole surrounded by a band containing other symbols—includes textual descriptions that exemplify the astral Chain of Being of the 1830s. Its Figure 2 declares Oliblish to be “the next grand governing creation” beside Kolob, which “hold[s] the key of power also, pertaining to other planets.” Figure 4 explains that the counting of time on Oliblish underlies the Hebrew word for the heavens themselves. Figure 5 is most striking; its Enish-go-on-dosh is a “governing planet” which borrows “light” through a “grand Key” or “governing power, which governs fifteen other fixed planets” (Abr. 3, following v. 22). 

In these temple-saturated accounts of a celestial hierarchy mediated by light and special keys, Smith made clear that celestial bodies were arranged into the same hierarchies as humans. Those hierarchies were governed by the same power—the temple-inflected priesthood that contained light, key words, and power. 

In tandem Smith modified the charismatic endowment of power of the Kirtland Temple, translating Masonic elements to that end and producing a cosmic catechism that prepared his followers to confront the “angels that stand as sentinels” whom they would meet after death.Inaugurated in May 1842 and rapidly expanded to include women, the Nauvoo Temple liturgy formed a Quorum of the Anointed. Within this liturgy, selected Saints began to learn more about the possibility that they would be celestial royalty and were encouraged to imagine themselves within the Abraham cosmogony as priests and priestesses in the post-mortal Chain of Belonging. 

As he revealed this temple liturgy, Smith kept the creation of eternal associations between people central. Though plural marriage has generated significant controversy, it was, among other things, an idiosyncratically biblical mode of increasing the number of people to whom a man was sealed.The model of the Chain of Belonging imparted to polygamy a decidedly dynastic scope. Smith used dynastic images explicitly to recruit wives, counseling young Lucy Walker that her acceptance of a sealing to him “would prove an everlasting blessing to my father’s house. And form a chain that could never be broken, worlds without End.”Helen Mar Kimball’s son eulogized her as the “golden link” connecting her father’s family to Joseph Smith.Though these specific phrases are probably influenced by later events, they correctly emphasize the familial chain that polygamy strengthened. 

By merging the chain’s hierarchy with familial images, Smith made the chain relationally dynamic. The capacity to reproduce helped believers see how they could acquire endless glory in the afterlife. Joseph Fielding understood well the implication of the doctrine, diarizing in 1844: “I understand that a Man’s Dominion will be as God’s is, over his own Creatures and the more numerous the greater his Dominion.”Benjamin F. Johnson recalled that “the Prophet taught us that Dominion & powr in the great Future would be Commensurate with the no of ‘Wives Childin & Friends’ that we inherit here.”The new grades of heaven reflected no simple statement of merit or ontological superiority: they were an index of one’s placement in the genealogy of eternal “intelligences.” These “intelligences” were the Mormon version of the “crowns of many stars” anticipated by Protestant evange lists.In this respect, the Mormon chain tapped a potential noted at least as early as the thirteenth century. In Lovejoy’s paraphrase of Aquinas, a human could “be like God in having preeminence over another” within the structure of the chain.In the Mormon version, the human capacity to reproduce held the promise of eternal progress, and patterns of family life pointed to a generational hierarchy within the chain. 

The ostensibly tripartite heavens espoused in Smith and Rigdon’s 1832 Vision hid the real extent of Smith’s heaven, which resided entirely within the celestial kingdom reserved for those who have “enter[ed] into this order of the priesthood.” Using code words for his marital system, the persistence of family life, and salvation, Smith warned that, outside his celestial kingdom in heaven, the dead “cannot have increase.”This heaven was organized around Smith’s Chain of Belonging, the harmonizing “economy” at which his 1832 revelation hinted. It was the single place that family could persist eternally. The 1843 revelation authorizing polygamy made the point emphatically. Those who did not enter this distinctive celestial family “cannot be enlarged”; they would remain “without exaltation,” a perfectionist term equated with salvation in this conception of the celestial kingdom. Those who rejected this form of marriage and family would be neutered angels who would endure salvation “separately and singly.” According to a July 1843 sermon, they would be “single & alone in the eternal world.”These disobedient souls would inhabit an essentially theocentric heaven without interpersonal relationships, while the obedient occupied the distinctively kinship-based heaven of the Chain of Belonging. 

The key to exaltation was the temple and Elijah’s priesthood. In a January 1844 sermon, Smith announced that the term “turn” in Malachi 5:6 (Elijah would “turn the hearts” of generations to each other) “should be translated (bind or seal).”Binding the generations through temple rites and their associated priesthood constituted the Chain of Belonging. In May 1844, Smith explicitly told his followers that the temple would allow them to supersede the angels, a key element of the ontological flattening of the Chain of Belonging: “You must have a promise, some ordinance some blessing in order to assend above principalities.”The “promise,” “ordinance,” and “blessing” were to be obtained in the temple. 

The Mormon heaven was emphatically not the Victorian hearth of the increasingly popular domestic heaven. Smith’s genealogical chain extended from Church members to their Prophet. From Smith, the chain extended to the biblical patriarchs, all the way to Adam, who would in turn present his priesthood chain to Jesus the Son and God the Father in the valley of Adam-ondi-Ahman.The domestic heaven was generally seen to consist of reasonably independent nuclear families; Smith’s heaven consisted of one boundless family of eternal intelligences—“a perfect chain from Father Adam to his latest posterity.”This lineage was crucial to Mormon salvation, as in Smith’s 1842 revelation to Newel Whitney, promising “honor and immortality and eternal life to all your house both old & young because of the lineage of my Preast Hood.”In the solicitous phrase of British convert Joseph Fielding to his friends, “We are dependent on each other as links in one vast chain.” They were making a soteriological point.The chain was the theological infrastructure and Smith’s temple priesthood was the welding that connected the links together in a way that secured their salvation. Through these rites and doctrines, Smith promised to “link the chain of the priesthood in Such a way that can not be broken.” 

General references to the Great Chain of Being persisted in the Nauvoo period, even as Smith gave it radically different meaning. In an 1843 pronouncement on the relationships between angels and celestial bodies, Smith referred explicitly to the hierarchical “scale of creation” for the cosmos.In January 1844, a Mormon editorialist, urged the gathering of the faithful by explaining: “The chirping sparrow upon the house top, fulfils the measure of his creation, in his own sphere, as much as an archangel does in his. ‘Whichever link you from the order strike, / Tenth, or tenth-thousand, breaks the chain alike.’” In this slight misquotation of Pope’s Essay on Man during the most public period of the elaboration of the Mormon Chain of Belonging, Latter-day Saints again endorsed the language, if not the content, of the original chain. (The same editorialist also emphasized the association between the astral degrees of glory of the 1832 Vision and the Chain of Being.) 

Divine Anthropology: The Eternal Progression of the Sons Ahman 

One of the most striking modifications Smith made to the Great Chain of Being was in his characterization of the relationships among angels, gods, and humans, what I call his divine anthropology. He had made his broad approach clear as early as 1832 with his “Sample of Pure Language,” and he and his followers had made continual references to the Mormon up-ending of the traditional chain, particularly with regard to the status of angels. In Nauvoo, the message became loud and unmistakable: the apparently suprahuman chain contained humans, the Sons Ah man. In the divine anthropology, angels, gods, and humans were conspecific, all members of the species called Ahman. Smith’s revision of the chain meant several things. What other Christians understood as angels were in fact resurrected humans; Joseph Smith reserved the term “angel” for a lower level in the chain. An gels were ultimately less than human, humans would advance forever, and God was a family man. 

Smith’s familialized chain required a reconsideration of the upper echelons of the chain in ways that directly dismantled the theocentric tradition. Smith, like Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688– 1772), rejected the traditional Christian view of a distinct ontology for angels.When family defined the chain, those supernatural beings that had once secured the upper expanses—the vast hierarchies of more-than-mortal immortals—lost ground to Smith’s Sons Ahman.When angels occupied suprahuman stations in Mormon thought, they did so only by their integration into the family tree. Theirs was a lineal rather than an ontological priority. Smith identified the best-known archangels of popular tradition—Michael and Gabriel—with the two founding fathers of humanity, Adam and Noah.Smith’s amanuensis, William Phelps, seized on these humanized angels in 1835 and in a letter to the Messenger and Advocate asked rhetorically: “Are the angels in glory the former prophets and servants of God?” He answered this question with an emphatic “Yes.”Sidney Rigdon, Smith’s early second-in-command, reiterated this claim in the same venue two months later. 

An 1843 revelation strongly emphasized Smith’s redefined status for angels, whose superiority depended only on their lineal priority. In fact, angels who could not be integrated into the family tree (along with those humans unfit for “exaltation”) would be retained as servants to their more exalted cousins, an inversion of Augustinian teaching.They would be “appointed angels in heaven, which angels are ministering Servants to minister for those who are worthy of a far more, and an exceeding, and an eternal weight of glory.”Stripped of family, these intelligences would become inferior to the core hierarchy of heaven. The de motion extended so far that the Nauvoo High Council asked rhetorically “Know ye not that we shall judge Angels?” then con confirmed explicitly: “The saints are to judge angels.”The supernatural beings who had been critical to religious valences of the chain ceded pride of place to Smith’s priesthood family. Though the imagery may be inflected by concepts of fraternal initiation, it is striking that the polygamy revelation told believers who had been adopted into the priesthood family by accepting plural marriage that they “shall pass by the angels” in the afterlife (D&C 132:19). 

Just as angels were demoted below humans, those humans experienced promotion—what the Saints called “exaltation.” Phelps assured believing Mormons in 1835 that they would “become angels, even Sons of God, for an eternity of glory.”He also foresaw that the faithful would inherit “a kingdom of glory; become archangels, even the sons of God.”Smith emphasized an even greater future for humans, using his royal image for angelized humans: “every man who reigns is a God.”His ambitious anthropology was sufficiently prominent in Mormon evangelism that outsiders commented on it. Critic Jonathan Baldwin Turner summarized in an 1842 attack, “Every Mormon is not only to be a god hereafter; he has, in his own belief, been a demigod from all eternity, or at least an angel heretofore.” 

The obliteration of suprahuman beings and the exaltation of humans in Smith’s chain collapsed the space separating humanity from God. By eliminating this space, Smith opened up the possibility of recasting God’s place in the chain in a direct assault on theocentrism. Though Protestants called God “Father,” Smith’s sacerdotal system understood the relationship in a new way. Just as God had stood above the pulpits at the Kirtland Temple, so he would stand at the head of the eternalized human family. This is the great mystery that Smith publicized in his most famous sermon, an address to the April 1844 Church conference inspired by the recent death of King Follett. There Smith announced the “secret” that “God Himself who sits enthroned in yonder heavens is a Man like unto one of yourselves.”Smith’s God was not the ontologically distinct creator of the Scale of Creation, but the founding parent of its genealogical hierarchy. 

In his June 1844 “Sermon in the Grove” a few weeks later, Smith clarified his chain, situating his polytheism—a “plurality of Gods”—within both biblical proof-texts and a restatement of the chain’s principle of gradation. After explaining that the intelligences of his chain would be called “kings and priests” (and by extension “queens and priestesses”) in a temple-saturated allusion to Revelation 1:6, Smith quoted from and amplified his Book of Abraham (Abr 3:18). The Mormon prophet explained that there “may exist two men on the earth—one wiser than the other— wo[ul]d. shew that an[o]t[he]r. who is wiser than the wisest may exist—intelligences exist one above anot[he]r. that there is no end to it.”To Smith, in a way he never entirely worked out, the fam ily of divinities had no end. His main point, however, was clear: Eternity was organized as a family. In the Sermon in the Grove, Smith also returned to the 1832 Vision. He explained that “Paul— says there is one Glory of the Sun the moon & the Stars—& as the Star differs &C.” The heirs of the astral glories, Smith continued, “are exalted far above princ[ipalities]. thrones dom[inions]. & an gels—& are expressly decl[are]d. to be heirs of God.”Smith’s followers, the heirs of God according to adoption theology, towered above the various grades of angels. Employing traditional names for hierarchies of angels (Eph. 3:10, 6:12; Col. 1:16), Smith strongly emphasized the inversion of the chain. 

It is difficult to read Smith’s King Follett Discourse except as an application of the temporal Chain of Being. Smith explained that to be “joint heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17) meant “to inherit the same glory power & exaltation” and to “ascend [to] a throne as those who have gone before.” Speaking for Christ, Joseph continued, “when I get my K[ingdom] workfed [sic] out I will present to the father & it will exalt his glory” so that “he will take a Higher exhaltation & I will take his place and am also exhalted.” Thus the Father “obtns K[ingdom] rollg. upon K[ingdom]. so that J[esus] treads in his tracks as he had gone before.”Speaking for Jesus, Smith explained the relationship between Father and Son as paradigmatic for all human relationships in the Chain of Belonging. “I saw my Father work out his kingdom with fear and trembling. . . . He obtains kingdom upon kingdom, and it will exalt his glory.”Attendee George Laub employed even more typically the image of the temporal chain in his summary of Smith’s preaching: “We are to goe from glory to glory & as one is raised the Next may be raised to his place or Sphere and so take their Exaltation through a regular channel. And when we get to where Je sus is he will be as far ahed of us in exaltation as when we started.” 

The Chain of Being was the infrastructure of this progressive theology. In Smith’s phrase, “You have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves; to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done; by going from a small degree to another, from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you are able to sit in glory as doth [sic] those who sit enthroned in everlasting power.” These transitions are the progress of the entire chain. Adopting the traditional image of the ladder to explain the temporal Chain of Being, Smith said: “When you climb a ladder, you must begin at the bottom and go on until you learn the last principle; it will be a great while before you have learned the last. . . . It is a great thing to learn salvation beyong [sic] the grave.”Smith was telling his followers to ascend a modern version of Jacob’s Ladder. As the Mormon faithful created sacerdotal families, they became heavenly fathers/mothers, priests/priestesses, and kings/queens. Thus did they become gods. 

The Chain after Smith’s Death 

In the aftermath of Smith’s death at the hands of a vigilante mob, his followers sought to understand and codify the elements of his Chain of Belonging. There was a lot at stake. The apostles were unable to recruit the crucial members of Smith’s family—his mother, his surviving brother, his widow, and his sons. This failure was a significant threat to their authority. Outside Nauvoo voo very few Latter-day Saints were yet aware of key doctrines being taught at headquarters, and the apostles needed a way to communicate the power of Smith’s theologies and rituals. The apostles needed to persuade the Church body of the superiority of their claims over those of Smith’s family while also convincing them of the validity of distinctive doctrines. The temple and the Chain of Belonging assisted the apostles significantly in this task.Smith’s ecclesial inner circle almost immediately went to work exploring the implications of Smith’s Chain of Belonging, both in doctrine and in ritual. 

William Phelps returned repeatedly to the image of the chain: in hymns, in a funeral sermon for the Smith brothers, and in a fictional presentation of the divine anthropology. Preaching Smith’s eulogy in 1844, Phelps used the rhetoric of the temporal chain, framing it within the Elijah sealing rituals. He announced to the grieving Saints, who had not yet completed construction of the Nauvoo Temple: 

When the temple is made ready for the holy work . . . we can go on from birth to age; from life to death; and from life to lives; and from world to heaven; and from heaven to eternity; and from eternity to ceaseless progression; and in the midst of all these changes; we can pass from scene to scene; from joy to joy; from glory to glory; from wisdom to wisdom; from system to system; from god to god, and from one perfection to another, while eternities go and eternities come, and yet there is room—for the curtains of endless progression are stretched out still and a god is there to go ahead with improvements. 

In this particular version of the temporal chain, God the Father pioneered the future perfections of humanity; Elijah’s temple was the nexus for Latter-day Saint connections to the Chain of Belonging. 

In his short 1845 fiction, “Paracletes,” Phelps referred to a universe “filled with a variety of beings,” an oblique allusion to the chain, which he saw as operative at the cosmogony. He then interpreted the King Follett Discourse and the Sermon in the Grove, stating that the “head” God was indeed God the Father of the Old Testament, supervising the endless ramifications of kings and priests in the sacerdotal genealogy.Phelps’s dedication hymn for the Nauvoo Temple maintained that “the wonderful chain of our union / Is tighten’d the longer it’s stretch’d.” 

Wilford Woodruff, stressing harmony after Smith’s death, preached that unity “is not confined to the Great Presidency of the Celest[i]al world, but serves as a chain by which the whole of the heavenly host are bound together in concert of action, sustaining the laws by which they are governed and preserved.” He continued, “Thus shall the chain which has bound together in one the hosts of heaven, extend and grasp in its circumference all who have been obedient to the mandates of God.”Employing Smith’s imagery, Woodruff conjured priesthood power and the correspondence between humans and cosmos. All operated with in the chain. 

In Parley Pratt’s phrase, “The resurrection from the dead re stores [an individual] to life with all his bodily and mental powers and faculties, and (if quickened by the celestial glory) consequently associates him with his family, friends and kindred, as one of the necessary links of the chain which connects the great and royal family of heaven and earth in one eternal bond of kindred affection and association.”Pratt reiterated Smith’s claims from his King Follett Discourse in an essay in early 1845. Latter-day Saints were to progress “till the weakest child of God which now exists upon the earth will possess more dominion, more property, more subjects, and more power and glory than is possessed by Je sus Christ or by his father; while at the same time, Jesus Christ and his father, will have their dominion, kingdoms, and subjects in creased in proportion.”This was the temporal chain. 

On December 26, 1844, Apostle Heber C. Kimball, “in his usual philanthropic manner, use[d] a chain as a figure to illustrate the principle of graduation, while in pursuit of celestial enjoyment in worlds to come.”Mourning their prophet, Mormonism’s inner circle found solace in the distinctive eschatology of their Chain of Belonging, a system safely separate from the theocentric and domestic heavens. 

Apostle John Taylor in 1846 explained that the Saints needed to understand “what ordinances to administer” that would “place you in a relationship to God and angels, and to one another.” Though Brigham Young invested great energy in completing the temple and codifying its liturgy in Nauvoo, during the exodus from Nauvoo the matter of adoption specifically became more prominent. Sacerdotal family units served to organize the migrating Saints, as they attempted to maintain their durable society in the face of severe dislocations. Young frequently and repeatedly used the image of the chain. A significant sermon in February 1847 communicated Young’s view of binding people to the ancients: Those sealed to an apostle were “bound . . . by that perfect chain according to the law of God and order of Heaven that will bind the righteous from Adam to the last saint and Adam will claim us all as members of his kingdom we being his children.” Young promised to “extend the Chain of the Pristhood back through the Apostolic dispensation to Father Adam just as soon as I can get a temple built.” 

Perhaps the best visual depiction of Smith’s Chain of Belonging is the “Diagram of the Kingdom of God” published in the Millennial Star and generally attributed to first-generation Apostle Orson Hyde. In Hyde’s description, this was 

the order and unity of the kingdom of God. The eternal Father sits at the head, crowned King of kings and Lord of lords. Wherever the other lines meet, there sits a king and a priest unto God, bearing rule, authority, and dominion under the Father. . . . The most eminent and distinguished prophets who have laid down their lives for their testimony . . . will be crowned at the head of the largest kingdoms under the Father, and will be one with Christ as Christ is one with his Father; for their kingdoms are all joined together . . . and to every man will be given a kingdom and a dominion, according to his merit, powers, and abilities. . . . There are kingdoms of all sizes, an infinite variety to suit all grades of merit and ability. 

Hyde explicitly equated moral (or ontological) with sacerdotal-genealogical gravity within the chain. The worthiest servants would stand highest in the chain, kings of their own subkingdoms. Degrees of glory, rendered here as “grades of merit,” are explicitly defined by their patriarchal scope. 

Young took Smith’s Chain of Belonging to a controversial conclusion in the last decades of his life, a doctrine known as “Adam God.” In some respects his was a natural conclusion—because God was the God of many worlds and Adam was the father of all humans on this earth, Adam could be seen as the god of the human family. Though his statements are susceptible to multiple interpretations, Young seems to have taken this idea further than Joseph Smith or most of his inner circle, with the notable exception of Eliza Roxcy Snow Smith Young. The main Church decisively rejected these specific doctrinal claims after Young’s death. 

Even as the Church backed away from the excesses of Adam God, images of the Chain of Being persisted. Orson F. Whitney, in his epic poem Elias, published in the late nineteenth century, re turned to the images Smith had employed. Whitney evoked “might of heaven, the pure and potent chain.” It was 

The all-creating, all-controlling chain 
Whereby the Gods perpetuate their reign 
Whereby the higher, bending, lift the lower. 

Whitney continued to appreciate that the chain was central to Smith’s conquest of death and family-ordered heaven—that it was a way to describe the connections among people. Mormons were “Welding the parted links of being’s chain / Old making new, the dead live again.” 

Over the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, images of the chain gradually receded. In its place, references to “binding” or “welding” links came to be understood within the context of a version of the domestic heaven. Wilford Woodruff’s termination of Young’s adoption rituals in 1894, part of the same process that resulted in the end of polygamy, signaled this transition.By the middle twentieth century, the Chain of Belonging had largely disappeared from rhetoric, though elements of the divine anthropology persisted. 

Conclusion 

Throughout his religious career, Joseph Smith expended considerable ritual, organizational, and intellectual energy in protecting human relationships from dissolution in the face of death. To effect this protection he extended the Great Chain of Being to familialize the entire cosmos, thereby recasting divine and angelic ontologies as he simultaneously divinized human beings. In this sacerdotal genealogy, protected and expanded by the temple and its associated rites—endowment, sealing, adoption, polygamy, and anointings—Smith announced to his followers a solution to death, one that mediated the contradictory demands of rising sentimentalism and the vast grandeur of patriarchal order. What was missing entirely was the capricious uncertainty of Calvinist election or the specter of backsliding from Arminian regeneration. 

Smith’s distinctive version of a formal philosophical construct provides several important windows into the cultural work of early Mormonism. First and foremost, this system demonstrated Smith’s great antipathy for both death and social incoherence. In a cultural milieu self-consciously beset by early mortality and the disruption of extended family ties, Smith proposed solutions whose details he worked out in the laboratory of the afterlife. Second, Smith’s use of what had by then become largely a common place to express an aspect of natural theology and a vague endorsement of perfectionism demonstrates his impressive intellectual resourcefulness in the face of death. Where others saw a defense against atheistic explanations of creation, Smith saw the weapon to vanquish the King of Terrors and protect kindreds from dissolution. Third, Joseph Smith’s modification of the Chain of Being shows the afterlife of a philosophical idea among religious practitioners. The formal construct of neoplatonism served to explain important social and emotional problems in a way attuned to the cultural setting in which early Mormons lived. 

Finally, understanding temple rites and Smith’s divine anthropology as aspects of his death conquest provides an emotional and spiritual valence missing from accounts of Mormon eschatology based primarily in perfectionism or biblical hermeticism. Smith and his followers anticipated not just crowns and sacred power in the afterlife; they looked forward to the tender embraces of loved ones to whom they were connected by both blood and deliberate allegiance. Although Smith is hard to summarize simply, the thrust of his later years was the creation of a kinship network whose ties were invulnerable to death.